Chloe Khoo Kai Yi 

In the beginning, when Chloe Khoo Kai Yi had to decide on the company to intern at, she struggled to make that decision. There were a lot of companies that were looking for interns and she got overwhelmed by all the information provided. She slowly sorted through the available positions and came across an Autodesk software product for one of her modules. She found it to be interesting and wanted to explore more about Autodesk. She went for Autodesk’s e-open house and was interested in one of their positions. She found out that Autodesk is a Multi-National Company (MNC) and wanted to experience how it is like to be working in an MNC. She wanted to know more people around the world, gaining knowledge and skills not just in the technical aspect, but also wanting to sharpen her soft skills and to learn about the different cultures that people get to experience around the globe.

 Her internship role was called Linguistic Quality Management, under Localization. Her duties included communicating with different stakeholders to ensure all information is relayed correctly, liaising with developers to create a common channel for easier communication among stakeholders, adapting current guidelines, and implementing feedback for the creation of new guidelines for stakeholders. She also had to retrieve, visualize, and analyze past and present data, as well as to predict future implications. Chloe assisted the developers to realize the areas of improvement for the company's platform portal after gathering the feedback from the stakeholders. She curated visual aids, simplified steps and reference materials for the company’s platform portal. Lastly, she would need to document the process of work done in a nice layout.

 There were quite a few things that Chloe learned on the job, outside the classroom. The biggest exposure was that her internship is in an industry that was new to her – Localization. She once thought that Localization is rather simple – just translating from one language to another to suit a country’s needs. But after her internship in Autodesk, she realized that localization is far beyond translation. Apart from translating, the Localization Team must ensure that all other contents are well suited in that country as well – for example, the tone, the words used, and the cultural adaptation. If either of this content is not localized into a specific country, then its people will not be able to understand the product easily.

 Aligning to her reason of wanting to experience working in an MNC, Autodesk gave her an experience far beyond what she had expected. Being an intern in Autodesk exposes one to understand MNC does not mean just working in Singapore, but also around the world. Sometimes employees need to compromise with the different stakeholders living in different parts of the world - finding a suitable time zone among all the stakeholders, communicating with languages apart from English, and giving and receiving feedback and opinions from different perspectives.

 Also, Autodesk has taught Chloe that while working, it is important for employees to have fun as well. Autodesk offers a range of diverse hobbies and interests platforms channels for like-minded individuals around the world to connect and share a common interest. There are also different celebrations such as birthday celebrations, and festival celebrations conducted yearly for the employees to celebrate the joyous occasions as one Autodesk family. Being an MNC, Autodesk connects its employees around the world together by organizing team bonding sessions among the different countries.

 The internship has taught her that both studying and working have their difficulties and enjoyment. Working life is very different from studying. As students, although they often feel that studying is continuous throughout the semester, students can study at their own pace. Students can adjust their time schedules to accommodate for the different commitments they may have. However, for working life, although there is fixed working hours that require the employees to be focused and complete the task, the employees can work on other commitments after working hours. More importantly, it gave Chloe a glimpse into what the new normal is – working from home. Her internship journey was a year after the pandemic has started, and although she got to work in the office, the default state is working from home. This experience has given her a glimpse into how working from home is like, as it might be the default state when she enters the workforce.

 Working from home saves some traveling time, and this makes it easier for Chloe to complete the work, but it also makes it difficult to connect and catch up with other colleagues. Chloe understands how difficult it is to connect, so it would be even more meaningful time spent when she got to meet her colleagues. She will cherish and treasure the time spent together more so than before the pandemic.

 Autodesk offered Chloe a lot of opportunities and she is grateful for that. She was offered to be part of the bonding team for her department and through it, she was involved in planning and executing the birthday celebrations for her department. She even got the chance to host a birthday celebration before she completed her internship journey. Most importantly, she was able to meet nice colleagues who taught and guided her well during and beyond her internship. She believes through communicating with them, they have taught her some life skills as well, such as not being afraid to voice out and reach out for assistance when she needed, even if it’s not work-related.